Hard Rain Falling (24 page)

At the reform school there had been precious few effeminate boys, and again sex life in the cottages was a group affair, the strong taking from the weak; but Jack didn’t join in much because he spent most of his time in the hole. There, of course, he could masturbate all he wanted, but he didn’t. It just made things worse.

Of the three alternatives, abstinence was the one he knew best, and he hoped that in San Quentin he would be able to forget about sex. He did not see how, with two men to a cell, you could get away with masturbating. These were all grown men. Masturbating was a kid trick, he thought, and only a childish man would resort to it. He learned very quickly that men in prison were treated like children and expected to act like children, even in, one might say especially in, the matter of sex. But he still did not see how he could get away with it.

But one ceaseless night he got to thinking about Mona, and from her his thoughts went without volition to vague erotic images of other women he had known, their flesh glowing before his eyes. He tried to think of other things, but it didn’t work. A breast, a nipple, a smooth flank would interrupt the flow of thought and he could feel his penis thickening and hardening, beyond his control. It should have been no problem at all, just jack off and forget about it. It had to happen once in a while. Either that or cut it off. It was infuriating to think that one organ could be in charge like that, turn his mind, make his whole body tremble; it was disgusting. But not two feet above his head Billy Lancing was asleep, or perhaps even
not
asleep, and he might hear Jack’s movements and lean his head over and ask him what he was doing. Or he might even know, understand, and say nothing. In the morning he would look amused. Jack had never heard Billy making any such noises, and often Jack did not get to sleep until long after midnight. Therefore, Billy did not masturbate. He had conquered his sexual desires. If Jack gave in, he would be the only one in the cell to give in. Furiously he threw himself over on his stomach and waited for the erection to subside. He thought about how funny it all was. He thought bitterly how funny it would seem to somebody not going through it. Like a bad hangover; a subject of much snickering. He wanted to ask Billy about it, but he did not dare. It was too personal.

What made it worse was that most of the men talked about sex incessantly, or so it seemed. To hear them tell it, the most virile men in America were here gathered, temporarily cutting womanhood off from their prowess. Yet you could not be in prison long without hearing about the love affairs that were going on right there, between the men themselves. Now that Jack seemed to have sex on the brain, he seemed to hear about nothing else. It was a commonplace to hear a man bragging about all the women he had slept with, and then without apparent transition begin discussing the cute little Mexican who worked in the bakery. It was all very embarrassing. One day while Jack was walking past the salad table with a stack of hot clipper racks, he happened to glance over in time to see one man slip a plastic ring on the finger of another man. Both were ordinary-looking men, one a burglar and the other a thief, but the expressions on their faces were ones Jack could never remember having seen on a man: one of them shy and coy, an outrageous burlesque of maiden modesty; the other simpering with equally feminine aggressiveness.

Another con, one of the cooks, saw the look of disgust on Jack’s face and gave him a steamy wink. Jack was actually embarrassed and could feel his already hot face reddening.

After that the prison seemed alive with affairs. It was unbelievable. These were grown men, and not queers, either. You could expect this from the few homosexuals, but to see a hardened old thief kissing a stubby Negro when he thought nobody was looking was beyond belief.

Finally Jack was approached. He was standing at the salad table, slicing carrots with a butcher knife, and one of the cooks came up behind him, made a remark about something inconsequential, and pushed his body up against Jack, his fingers touching him briefly on the hips. After the momentary shock of the contact passed, Jack said out of the corner of his mouth, “Take it on the heel and toe, or I’ll have your balls for a watch fob,” and the man backed away, offended, and said, “You don’t have to get bitchy about it.” Jack turned and gave him an evil grin, holding the butcher knife low and twirling its tip. “Split,” he said.

Yet even having refused the man had a
bitchy
quality about it, as if he were queer, and was available, but just not to this particular cook. And besides, there was no denying that the pressure of the man against him had roused him. It had been pleasant, damn it.

Another time, a con said to him, “Oh, we know you’re playing hard to get.” There did not seem to be any answer. It had been on the tip of Jack’s tongue to say, “Oh no I’m not,” but that hardly would have cleared the matter up.

But it was not just a question of courtship and seduction, which after all, he reasoned, probably helped a lot of the men forget themselves for a while. There were also the prison wolves, homosexual rapists, who would get it into their heads that they wanted a particular man, and then go after him with single-willed determination until they caught him in a corner somewhere. These wolves sometimes worked in pairs or threes, and it was very difficult to avoid them once they had their eyes on you. Things had been quiet for a while, because just before Jack arrived a man had been killed in the shower by one of these wolves, and there was a big crackdown. All the known wolves had been moved around and were being watched carefully. The one who had done the knifing hadn’t been caught, but the population was certain that it was a factory worker named Clifford, a gigantic Negro armed robber who had his fingers into almost every racket in the prison; an organizer, a dominant personality, a natural leader. Even the guards were afraid of him. He was serving life as a habitual criminal, and so had settled down to making the prison his own private territory. Even the tightly knit, secretive Muslim group was afraid of him, though they claimed to admire him.

Jack was not afraid of Clifford or the other wolves, but Billy was. He had been caught twice, he admitted, and both times he thought he was going to be killed. “So I just laid there and
took
it, man,” he said. “What the fuck, I ain’t going to die for a virgin asshole.”

The really bad times for Jack, now, were the hours spent locked up in his cell with
another man
, with live flesh, a warm human body that grew more attractive each night, until Jack’s fantasies no longer were about women but about Billy; how they could grapple together in secret as so many dozens of others were doing probably right at that instant, all up and down the tiers of cells, in secret and private, enjoying the flavor of each other’s hot thrusts; while he, Jack, lay in murderous frustration and agony. After a while it was even funny. He knew that the only tangible thing that stood in his way was fear of refusal; that, and a strong reluctance to make the overtures. He didn’t even know what to say to Billy. He was not going to get up in the middle of some dark night and tap Billy on the shoulder and say, “How about it?” or, “Say, let’s you and me screw,” or anything of the sort. Nor would he invite Billy into his bunk, winking and grinning and pointing. What if Billy laughed at him? What if Billy groaned with passion and tried to
kiss
him? It was impossible.

So they lay there, both of them, in the smutty darkness, each dreaming and wishing the other would make a move. Billy, of course, was afraid that Jack would break his neck if he got funny.

One morning on the big yard, Jack was watching a game of dominoes between two of the best players in the prison, and a man standing next to him, whom he knew only slightly, said, “That Billy’s awfully sweet, isn’t he?”

“I guess so,” Jack said. He was getting resigned to this kind of talk, even though it sent a pang of guilt through him.

“You
guess
so?” the man grinned. “Who would know better than you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean, motherfucker?” Jack snarled.

“Shut up, you guys,” said one of the players.

That night Jack said to Billy, “What’s all this shit about you and me?”

“You and me what?” Billy asked.

“You know goddam well what. Everybody in the joint thinks you and me’re shacked up.”

“Well, we ain’t,” Billy snapped. “So why bug me about it?”

“Because I think you probably started it yourself, that’s why, you little shit.”

Billy looked disgusted and climbed up on his bunk with a book. Jack was ashamed of himself, but he would not apologize. “Piss on the little bitch,” he thought.

A few nights later Jack heard strange noises from the upper bunk. He knew what was going on. Still, out of spite, he whispered, “What’s goin on?”

The noises stopped. After a moment, Billy’s furious whisper: “I’m jackin off! What the fuck did you think I was doin?”

Jack giggled. “I thought you had somebody up there with you.”

There were moments of silence.

Jack whispered, “Well, go ahead. Don’t let me stop you.”

“She-it,” Billy said. “I done lost mah train of thought.”

Gutty little bastard, Jack thought. He went into a deep and pleasant sleep.

But if homosexuality was absurd, what about no sex, or masturbation, or normal sex itself? Wasn’t it all equally absurd, futile, and comical? Think of the things people do to each other, and for each other, just to get rid of an itch! Think of how it must look to an observer! Think of a creature so constructed that in order to survive, eat, sleep, procreate, get the snot out of its nose, it had to be triggered by pleasure instead of rationality; think of an animal that wouldn’t have sense enough to evacuate its bowels if it weren’t
fun
, and who, blinded by that very pleasure, actually pursued it as if the pleasure was the goal! Think of the lengths this creature would go, to make sure his itch was stroked by one particular person, of one particular size and shape, when in truth any other person would accomplish the same end! What a joke! Imagine a man horribly afflicted with psoriasis, great itching scabs covering his entire body, who got it into his head that no one but a certain girl’s fingers could relieve him; think of this man in all his agony dressing in an itchy woolen suit, his whole body trembling, screaming out, while he stands before a mirror combing his hair, scenting himself, then rushing across the city to the home of this girl, waiting on her, babbling to her about home and future and love and flowers and sweetness, while beneath his suit his body cries out in anguish to be scratched; think of him, seated on the couch beside her (she all modestly pulled away into the corner, and he knowing deep in his heart that she, too, itched and must be scratched or die) and secretly rubbing himself against the couch for some partial relief, until the great moment comes and they strip themselves and expose their scabby reddened bodies and begin, modestly, delicately, to scratch each other while the pleasure of it all swells up into their minds and blots out all thought; until, finally, and naturally, they lie back exhausted, knowing that soon, very soon, they are going to start itching again...just think of it!

It struck him with horrible force. His parents, whoever they were, had probably made love out of just such an itch. For fun, for this momentary satisfaction, they had conceived him, and because he was obviously inconvenient, dumped him in the orphanage; because he, the life they had created while they were being careless and thoughtless, was not part of the fun of it all; he was just a harmful side effect of the scratching of the itch; he was the snot in the handkerchief after the nose had been blown, just something disgusting to be gotten rid of in secret and forgotten. Cold rage filled him, rage at his unknown parents, rage at the life he had been given, and for such trivial, stupid reasons! For one wild second of ejaculation! For that, he had been born. This same thing that was keeping him awake nights, and inexorably turning him into a prancing faggot, was the cause of his existence. Fifteen or twenty minutes on a forgotten bed between two probable strangers had given him twenty-four years of misery, pain, and suffering, and promised, unless he were to die soon, to go on giving him misery for another forty or fifty years, locked up in one small room or another without hope of freedom, love, life, truth, or understanding. A penis squirts, and I am doomed to a life of death. It has got to be insanity; there has got to be a God, because only an insane God could have created such a universe.

There was no reason at all why Jack should not do exactly as he pleased. He and Billy became lovers. It was an arrangement, coldly conceived for sexual satisfaction, without even words that first time, but limited by coldly precise and rational language from there on out. The terms were that they would use each other’s bodies for that ornate form of masturbation called Making Love, but there was to be no question of emotional involvement, or prying into one another’s soul. This, they decided coldly, would keep them from going crazy or queer.

Things had been going much too well at the bowling alley, perhaps that was what was the matter. Billy’s shoeshine stand was right next to the check-out counter and only a few feet from either the all-night lunch counter or the pool tables, and he had a team of four boys who did the actual shining of shoes (although Billy would take over for special customers, big spenders, etc.) and there didn’t seem to be anybody in Seattle who could beat him at his own games of one-pocket, nine-ball, or straight pool. He was making money, very good money, not only from his stand but an actual salary from the management: Billy was in charge of maintenance, and he had discovered in himself a talent for managing things, for halting arguments, for overseeing the hundred details of a 24-hour establishment without undue strain on himself.

Perhaps Billy’s status as resident pool artist was as important to the management as anything else. Billy drew people to the bowling alley, especially from 2 A.M. to dawn, when nothing much else was open, and the poolhall habitués from all over Seattle would gather, sitting in the double row of theater seats overlooking the pool section. These men, especially the better players, respected Billy for his talent, and among them there was an inner circle, including and revolving around Billy, of men who had been out on the road and played in the big poolhalls of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and who could talk about the great players and the great games; who had adventures of their own to tell the younger men, the boys, who had never been on the road. And of course they all played, especially the kids, and the usual winner of the games they played—two-bit nine-ball, dollar snooker, an occasional five-dollar game—was the house, and so the house did not mind if they came around when they were broke, because the house knew that when they did have some money they would bring it and spend it.